It’s also interesting watching the conservatives and right wingers attacking Obama over his assurances that Ebola was unlikely to get into the US on flights.

Let’s unpack this shall we?

1) The person who has Ebola was asymptomatic on the flight. He wasn’t feverish, wasn’t vomiting, and wasn’t showing any symptoms. Do we keep that person off the flight to the US, which wasn’t even a direct flight from the region?

2) How many other diseases have symptoms that mimic those of Ebola. I’ll wait. You might have to go through a lot of diseases first - including common colds, the flu, and even malaria.

3) A person is only capable of spreading the disease when the person is symptomatic.

4) It appears that the hospital screwed up - they released him even though he apparently told the intake nurse he’d been in Liberia. That’s a major problem. That failure allowed additional potential and actual exposures.

Those persons are now being monitored for symptoms. That includes family members, who would have been exposed in any event.

5) Shutting down airline travel to the region will have only minimal impacts in the US since there are few direct flights. Stopping even indirect flights will actually have a net negative effect because vital personnel going in-out of the region, let alone food and supplies, to say nothing of Ebola-related containment equipment, testing gear, and samples for further examination would be delayed or detained indefinitely.

The best way to stop the spread of the disease by air means addressing this at the source. I’m spitballing here, but a quarantine period of 3 weeks before leaving the country might be a good idea - that’d give a chance for authorities to definitively clear someone for travel. The problem, as I’ve mentioned before is that there’s so few doctors in the region and the authorities are stretched so thin that it’s tough to get those rules in place.

There’s also a real concern about how waste from Ebola isolation treatment here in the US is being disposed of. The CDC and hospitals are working on setting up a protocol for sterilizing the medical wastes, some of which can contain highly infectious bodily fluids. That includes the use of autoclaves and incineration.